Only Advanced-Degree Holders See Wage Gains

Why do polls show Americans are so cranky these days? Well, maybe it has something to do with their paychecks.

A lot of them aren’t keeping up with inflation, as modest as (government-measured) inflation has been. In fact, new Census Bureau data show that if you divide the population by education, on average wages have risen only for those with graduate degrees over the past 10 years. (On average, of course, means that some have done better and some have done worse.)

Here (thanks to economist Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business) are changes in U.S. workers wages as reported in the latest Census Bureau report, adjusted for inflation using the CPI-U-RS measure recommended by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: